Senator Bob Casey from Pennsylvania is legislating something big, the “Create Jobs and Save Benefits Act.”
Innocuous? Everyone wants more jobs. Government may have a lousy track record creating jobs that actually produce things demanded by people, but still — the bill is hardly unexpected in times like these.
It’s the second half of the title that indicates the powder keg within. The bill would bail out horrendously mismanaged union pension plans.
Unions, in the current legal context, are legal creatures of the state, with special privileges. And, surprise surprise, their own pensions — the ones that they manage — appear to be in as bad shape as the public-employee pensions I’ve talked about before, the ones that are building into a tsunami of insolvency.
A public bailout would transfer money from people without any special pension plan to people with pensions that are going bust. This is horribly unjust. That’s why Americans for Limited Government — a past sponsor of this program — is calling out Republican politicians who’ve signed onto Casey’s audacious scheme.
“At issue are multi-employer pension plans, in which companies across an industry pay into a single pension pool,” explains the Wall Street Journal. “[E]ven before 2006 only about 6% of multi-employer plans were fully funded, compared to about 31% of single-employer plans. The real problem is that multi-employer plans have become a sort of pension Ponzi scheme.”
Hmmm. Where have we heard that before?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
5 replies on “Save the Unions’ Ponzi Schemes?”
Incompetence comes in many forms. Unions do not have a corner on that market. Every Union Pension Plan I have seen is a joint union-management plan negotiated at the bargaining table. Public employee pension plans are administered by state appointed personnel. Yes, incompetence is everywhere.
“The government cannot create private sector jobs“_B. Obama in his speech this week
Ponzi schemes work like a charm if you are in the pool of first folks to cash out.
The escalating debt, that Bernanke has said there is NO plan to address, is not going to be REALLT out of control until starting 2018, when the fist state pension funds start pulling cash out of the states in a big way. Be a good time to be not working and having your equity converted into portable unregistered assets, because they are going to tax the h*ll out of everything else even if the dhimocrats get routed. Nothing short of a return to the original republic and a disassembly of the welfare state will stop this.
Choices: go back to the original Constitution and the productive free market and secondary solid economy by intentionally destroying the welfare state, or wait for the welfare state to implode and deal with the socialist oligarchy that arises.
One path to freedom.
Like other legislation, it will be misnamed something such as “The Bill for Americans, Mom and Apple Pie” but in reality it will be favors to special interests, at our expense. A better title would be “Favors to Special Interests that Screw You (unless you’re the special interest or the politician receiving their campaign contributions”
Tell The Unions To Go Scratch !!! They Are Corrupt And Destroying This Country !!!
What a crock. The Indiana Governor had it right .… decertifying Indiana’s public-employee unions !
From Time magazine at … http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1997284 – 3,00.html
Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, a budget czar in the free-spending Bush Administration, has proved an efficiency fiend at the state level, privatizing bureaucracies, selling a poorly managed toll road, even harvesting the paper clips from state tax returns for reuse in government offices. Daniels took the controversial step of decertifying Indiana’s public-employee unions, a move that may endear him to Republican voters should he decide to run for President in 2012.